


call me by name, make me yours

by Areiton



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Claiming, Domestic Violence, Fluff and Angst, Grim Reaper - Freeform, Grim Reaper Bucky Barnes, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Mutual Pining, POV Bucky Barnes, POV Steve Rogers, Pining, Possessive Behavior, Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-War, Protective Bucky Barnes, Protective Steve Rogers, Steve's horrible mental health, Suicidal Thoughts, soft boys in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:34:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 17,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23402317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Areiton/pseuds/Areiton
Summary: When Steve is seven, frail and sick, defiant and brilliantly brave--Death comes for him. A boy who is not a boy, who watches with ice blue eyes and a longing kind of curiosity.When Steve is seven and terrified--he meets Bucky.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 157
Kudos: 364
Collections: Marvel Trumps Hate 2019





	1. The Boy Who Is Not  A Boy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kalika_999](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalika_999/gifts).



> This my first Marvel Trumps Hate fill, written for Kali, and I had so much fun writing it! Enjoy!

When he is seven, a frail and sickly thing with so much fury and kindness in him that he has never seemed  _ small _ to Sarah, her Steve falls sick. 

He's sick often, often enough that she knows this time is different, the rattle in his chest wet and rough and terrifying. 

When he is seven, Sarah Rogers prays to a god she doesn't believe in, a god that stole her Joe and left her facing this world with only Steve to light it up, and it's desperate and furious and pleading. 

She begs for his life and her tears soak his blankets as the long night wears on. 

~*~ 

In the shadows, a boy who is not a boy watches, ice blue eyes wide. The crying startles him, and makes him hesitate, his grip tight on his staff. 

The boy sleeping fitful on the bed is sick, even  _ he  _ can see that, but there is something lovely about them, the tear-stained mother and her winter wheat hair spilling across her son, her son’s pale skin and pale hair and dark shadows in the thin skin under his eyes. 

“You’re here for me, aren’t ya,” he croaks, and it startles him, the boy who is not a boy, startles him enough that he jerks, and sheds his shadows, just a little, and Steve’s eyes go wide, surprised. 

“Supposed to take you,” the boy who is not a boy says, and twitches. He stares at Sarah and asks, curious, “Why does she cry?” 

Steve’s hand, resting in his mother’s hair, spasms, and she stirs, a little, a noise like a wail in her throat. The boy who is not a boy shifts away, into the shadows, skittish and Steve says--”Stop.”

And he does. 

“What’s your name?” Steve asks, and the boy who is not a boy cocks his head, curious. 

“I don’t have a name,” he says, because names are for those he takes, for the dying. 

Death has no need of a name. 

No one has ever wanted to  _ call  _ Death, after all. 

“You gotta have a  _ name, _ ” Steve says, indignant. “Everyone has a name!” 

The boy who is not a boy shivers in the shadows and says, innocent and ancient, “Would you give me one?” 

Steve stares at his mother, at her hair soft and dry under his hand and the shadows shifting and alive in the corner, the creature watching him big-eyed and curious. 

“She’s cryin’ cuz you’re here for me,” Steve says. “But if you come back tomorrow--if you wait just a little while to take me--I’ll give you a name tomorrow.” 

The boy who is not a boy hesitates. He is young and this boy--this  _ Steve _ is brilliant, beautiful, and  _ his _ . 

But perhaps not  _ yet.  _ Not tonight. 

His hand tightens on the staff and the boy who is not a boy, the nameless shadow,  _ Death _ says, hopeful and eager, “Tomorrow?” 

Steve leans back into the pillow, and his breath rattles in his chest and he smiles, startlingly beautiful, “Yeah. Tomorrow.” 

~*~ 

It goes like this for four days. 

Steve hovers, not quite dying, not getting well, and Sarah watches over him, gripped with fear, and every night, when she has passed into an exhausted sleep at his side, the boy who is not a boy steps out of the shadows. 

Steve thinks he should be more afraid of Death than he is. But he’s not afraid of  _ Death-- _ death is a boy who looks his age, clutching a scythe too tall for his body, with eyes wide and scared and a smile that peeks out when Steve tells him stories. 

Death is gentle with him, when he coughs too hard, and watches Sarah with wide-eyed awe and looks confused when Steve says, “I still ain’t got a name for you. You come back tomorrow, and I’ll give it to you then.” 

Death has been his  _ companion  _ for four days, but Death has chased him since he was born, and he isn’t  _ scared _ of it, isn’t scared of dying 

It makes him mad, but now--now he’s too tired to be angry. 

“Tonight?” the boy asks, with a shy, buck-tooth smile, and Steve shrugs. 

“Tell me about somewhere far away from here,” he says instead of giving him a name, and the boy who is not a boy grins, steps out of the shadows and curls at Steve’s side. 

“I went to the Grand Canyon once,” he says. 

~*~ 

On the fifth night--the boy who is not a boy steps out of the shadows and Steve inhales, a sharp noise that makes Sarah stir, uneasy, in her sleep. He goes still, the way he always does, protective and watchful, when his mother is disturbed, and the boy mirrors him, an eerie unnatural stillness. 

Only when Sarah is sleeping again, her hand clutched in Steve’s dirty thin blanket does he look at the boy who is not a boy again, sucking on his lip, buck teeth blood stained. 

“Bucky,” he says, weakly. “What happened?” 

“I didn’t do what I was told,” he says, looking down, a red bruise livid on his cheek. “I was supposed to Reap you.” 

This--that sad look, that red mark--this is  _ Steve’s  _ fault. Someone  _ hurt _ Bucky, his  _ friend _ , and it’s  _ his fault.  _

“Take me,” he says, abruptly. 

~*~ 

The boy who is not a boy--shadows, darkness, Reaper, _ Death-- _ shivers, because…

Because Steve is no longer touching Sarah’s hair, grounding and claiming and clinging to life. 

Steve is staring at him, eyes bright and defiant and brave, and his gaze keeps tracking over the red bruise on his face, something like sorrow in the set of his mouth, and--

“You called me Bucky,” the boy who is not a boy--the boy who is called Death and Darkness and Reaper, but never,  _ never _ called by  _ name _ \--whispers. 

Steve flushes, a little, a tiny hopeful smile at the edge of his mouth. “Do you like it?” 

Bucky tips his head, a thinking gesture, but he already knows he loves it. 

Already knows he will always answer to it, and claim it like he has never wanted any of the other things he’s been called. 

“I won’t take you,” he says, instead of answering, and something in the room  _ shifts _ , answers that defiant declaration. “ _ They can’t have you _ ,” he snarls, and for the first time, he sees fear in Steve’s eyes. 

He doesn’t mind. Steve is altogether too comfortable with Death, Bucky worries about him, worries he’d walk hand in hand with one of Bucky’s siblings because he’s too damn brave to be afraid. 

“You’re  _ mine, _ ” he says, and it’s fierce and claiming, as much as Steve naming him was claiming. 

Steve smiles, and he nods. “Ok, Bucky.” 

~*~ 

When Steve is seven, frail and sick, defiant and brilliantly brave--Death comes for him. A boy who is not a boy, who watches with ice blue eyes and a longing kind of curiosity. 

When Steve is seven and dying, Death reaches for him, and he names it, and leashes it, and claims it for himself. 

When Steve is seven and terrified--he meets Bucky. 


	2. The Boy Who Stayed

Bucky doesn’t leave. 

Steve gets better, almost overnight, the rattling cough fading into nothing, color rising into his cheeks. Sara stares at him in wonder in the morning, her eyes bright with unshed tears, and Bucky watches from the shadows. 

A week later, Steve is back in school, and Bucky is finally, smug and pleased, at his side. 

~*~ 

Sarah Rogers knows that her boy is different. He’s sick--doctors told her when he was born that he’d never live, and she’d cursed him with a quiet sort of determination, ordered him from her house, and set about proving him wrong. 

She did.  _ They  _ did. Despite all odds--Steve lived. 

But he didn’t thrive. He was small, sickly, brilliant and fierce, the brightest spot of light in her life, and a cold wind away from Death’s door. 

He didn’t have friends. 

He didn’t have a girl he was sweet on, or a pack of boys to play stick ball with, or even good marks in school. He was bull-headed and defiant, and sharp tongued, all rage and spite crammed into a body too small. 

Which is why it was so very surprising when Steve spilled into the apartment, and her gaze traces over him, worried since his recent brush with death, and sees a boy, bigger than Steve, pale skin and dark hair and disturbing pale eyes fixed on her boy. 

“Ma,” Steve says, bright as only Steve can be, “this is my pal. Bucky.” 

~*~ 

Bucky fixes himself to Steve’s side. 

“Don’t you gotta reap?” Steve asks him, once, after Sarah has left for work and the two are laying in the warm apartment. There’s a draft coming from one of the windows and Bucky scowls at it. 

“I do,” Bucky says, absently and Steve makes an indignant noise. “I don’t sleep, Stevie,” Bucky says, patiently. 

“Oh,” Steve says, because he’d never thought of that. 

Bucky doesn’t tell him that he is reaping animals, now, that his parents and theirs, the entire order of Reapers despair of the blue eyed boy who couldn’t reap a dying boy. 

He doesn’t tell Steve that he stays because there is nowhere for him to go, that his own kind have turned their back on him, called him useless, a failure. 

That they  _ hurt _ him, when he travels through shadows to their quiet dens. 

He pushes that aside, and clings to Steve like a overly affectionate burr, dug deep into him and impossible to budge. 

Steve, he finds, doesn’t mind. 

~*~ 

When Sarah asks, careful and casual, Bucky blinks at her and tells her he's from the local orphanage, and she stops asking about his parents, sympathy bright on her features. Steve frowns a little, at the lie. 

He's a good boy, Bucky knows. He's honest and brave and so damn  _ bright _ that sometimes Bucky aches, looking at him. 

Lying to Sarah bothers him, and Bucky knows it. 

"She can't know the truth," Bucky tells him, and Steve frowns. Bucky nudges aside the fingernail he's worrying at and hands him an apple slice that Steve nibbles at, half-hearted. 

"She wouldn't mind." 

Bucky gives him a look full of disbelief. 

Sarah has watched her son dance with death for seven long years--she won't take kindly to Death walking in his shadow, leashed by his kindness. 

"She'd send me away," Bucky says. "She wouldn't understand--"

That I won't hurt you, he doesn't say. That I won't leave you or take you or let anything hurt you. 

He doesn't say it, because he thinks Steve is still a little bit fragile, not that Bucky would ever say that to his face. 

Steve is a fierce little scrap of bones and Bucky doesn't want that fearsome temper turned on him. 

"It's safer this way," Bucky says, pleading and Steve sighs, a little and grudgingly nods and Bucky breathes out a sigh of relief. 

Nudges his apple and says, "Eat your fruit, Stevie." 

~*~ 

Steve is never truly  _ healthy _ . But in the months after Bucky fixes himself to Steve's side, he's  _ better _ . He coughs less, a little bit of color in his pale cheeks, a tiny padding of fat on his thin ribs. 

Bucky is attentive to the point of motherhenning, something that Sarah finds sweet and then absurd, and then invaluable. 

It doesn't last. 

It never does, with Steve. 

A cold wet rain catches the boys on their way home from Mass, and a cough settles, wet and rough, in Steve's lungs, sends him shaking to his bed, and Bucky--

Bucky settles at his bedside, his small face drawn and fierce, and he won't be moved. Even when Sarah orders him away, the boy sneaks back, slips with the shadows through the window while she sleeps and curls at her son's side, perched like a protective angel. 

Once, she hears him whispering, soft to the sleep boy, "They can't have you, Stevie. You're  _ mine _ . I am yours and you are  _ mine _ , and  _ they _ can't have you." 

The words feel like a vow and a challenge both, like he's speaking to someone beyond the sick child on his sweaty sheets. 

It chills her, and she finds it unaccountably reassuring. 

~*~ 

Bucky is Steve's shadow, his best friend, his protector. His leashed reaper. 

But Bucky is what he is, and Steve has never asked him to be anything  _ but _ himself. 

Death is a siren song, calling to him, and he shifts, away from Steve, sometimes. Sometimes, long fingers circle a thin wrist, tug him carefully behind as Bucky turns toward the aching call. 

Sometimes, it's a kitten, one of the thousands of rats. 

Once it's a boy, frozen near the river, and Steve had shivered as Bucky knelt at his side, shadows swelling and swallowing him and the boy and when he rose from the mud, his skin was brighter, flush and healthy. 

Steve thinks that Death is good for Bucky. 

~*~ 

"Stevie," Bucky whispers, but Steve is sleeping, the still deep sleep that always precedes one of his colds, so Bucky wraps him up in blankets and slips out of the window, the haunting melody tugging at him, a wandering meandering that stops at a crumpled body near the water. 

The woman isn't pretty. She's bruised and bloody, and curled around her swollen belly, protective, and she snarls, kitten weak and almost as threatening, when Bucky crouches next to her. 

She blinks at him, pale skin and dark hair and strange eyes, and she says, her voice raspy, "You can't take me, you bastard. Not yet." 

Death clings to her, a lover's caress, an attacker's heavy bruises. 

She glares, stubborn and furious, and trembling as she curls around her pregnant belly.

She reminds him of Stevie, fierce and fair and unafraid. 

"No," he whispers, and she shivers. "No, I won't let anyone take you." 

Pain fogged eyes go wide, and she stares, startled, as he reaches for her, as he wraps long fingers around a frail wrist and smiles. 

The shadows shiver and the siren song of death swells and swells and--dies. 

"Let's get you home, doll," he murmurs.

~*~ 

Her name is Fred, she tells him 

Winifred Barnes. 

She doesn't tell him about the bruises on her face, or the blood on her thighs, or the belly full of baby, or the way her eyes flick, wide and fearful, to the door at every sound. 

She doesn't need to. Bucky stays close to her, and soothes her when she finally cries. 

~*~ 

Her husband comes in well into the night, smelling of blood and brine and beer, and the boy who stayed, the boy who is not a boy, smiles and slips from the shadows. 

~*~ 

"You aren't a boy at all, are you?" Fred asks, later. Joe Barnes is gone, and the bruises on her face are all that remains of him. 

The bruises and the baby. She's bright, vibrantly alive, kicking in her mother's belly, and Bucky is inordinately fond of her, already. 

"You know what I am. You knew from the start," he says, quietly. 

"Then why are you here?" she asks. "Why do you stay?" 

"There's a boy," Bucky says, softly. "I can't leave him. I  _ won't  _ leave him. And--" his gaze tracks over her belly, and she smiles, touches it gently. 

"Well, then. We can't have you livin' in the orphanage," she says, and Bucky blinks at her, at her eyes that are steady and strong and soft, too. 

Fred gives him his second name, a gentle chain that he loves almost as much as he loves  _ Bucky _ . 

Fred gives him  _ her _ name, and her love, and a home. 


	3. The Man Called Death

Bucky Barnes is different than Steve's Bucky. Bucky Barnes is the strange, charming son of Fred Barnes, the doting older brother of Becca. He's a burr in Steve Roger's side, a grinning presence at his side, but with Fred's hand on his shoulder and Becca tucked into the crook of his arm, he's also the darling of the neighborhood. 

If some of them shiver, when he passes in the twilight hours, no one mentions it. 

If sometimes, Bucky stills, staring a little long and hard at someone on the street, no one ever comments that those looks are usually followed by a funeral. 

No one mentions that shadows pool at Bucky's feet and his eyes gleam unnatural. His mother's hand on his shoulder and Steve's furious glare keep those whispers silent, if they ever gain steam. 

~*~ 

They go to Fred's house, more. 

Sarah doesn't comment, doesn't thank the other mother--she just uses the time her son is tucked away and safe to work longer hours, squirreling money away for the next lung-rattling cough. 

They go to Fred's house, more, especially on days when Steve fights with bullies. 

The older they grow, the more frequent those days come. 

Fred always sighs, a little, at the thunderous look on Bucky's face and the petulant glare on Steve's, the blood on both of them.

"You shouldn't fight so much, boy," Fred tells Steve once, when Bucky paces with Becca, a low snarl in his throat. 

"Why?" 

She looks at Bucky, and her fingers circle Steve's wrist, the same way Bucky will lead him, sometimes. It makes him go still and she smiles. 

"He's got darkness in him, Stevie. And he is yours, but that makes you _his_ \--and he doesn't like his people to hurt." 

"Bucky'd never--" 

"Bucky killed a man who hurt me, because I reminded him of you," Fred says, simply, and Steve goes quiet, thoughtful and still. 

She smiles, and kisses his hair, standing to take Becca and Bucky comes to him, a whirl of shadows and furious whispers, and strong arms wrapped around him. 

~*~ 

Steve never does stop getting into fights. 

Too stubborn, too angry, too _Steve_ to walk away from a fight--he never does. 

Bucky teaches him how to throw a punch without hurting himself, how to use his tiny body to slip away and duck close, how to make the best of what little he had to make the rest of the world _hurt_. 

And when that wasn't enough--Bucky was there, hands soft and gentle nudging Steve aside, eyes alight with darkness and a terrible kind of glee, finishing every fight that Steve can't, and when that happens, when Bucky beat the hell out of every Brooklyn bully who had the nerve to fight Steve Rogers--

Steve can see him, then. 

Not Bucky, his best friend, his protector, Fred Barnes' son--in moments like that, when there's blood in Bucky's mouth and a wild grin on his lip and shadows dancing at his feet, and death a step away--

Steve can see what Bucky is, can see the Reaper, the killer that he was born to be, and not the facsimile of a _person_ that Steve has shaped him to be. 

~*~ 

When Steve is sixteen, Sarah gets sick. 

Bucky is sitting next to Steve, half-dozing while Steve leans against him and sketches, when Sarah coughs, a deep rattling thing that she’s been fighting for a week. 

Bucky’s head snaps up, eyes bright and alert and _full_ somehow and Steve--

Steve _knows._

~*~ 

Bucky lurks at home in shadow drenched rooms, snaps at Becca until she snarls back, all teeth and claws, as fierce and dangerous as a kitten against him. Fred watches, her eyes bright and sharp, but she doesn't do anything to separate them. 

She knows how dangerous her son is, saw the evidence of that when she should have died and didn't. 

She spent too long under the bruising fists of her dead husband--she _likes_ that Becca is growing up next to Bucky and his dangerous _otherness_ , likes that her girl will grow up strong and dangerous in her own way, that she will never be prey. 

She doesn't intercede, doesn't soothe Bucky's fierce temper and dark shadows, doesn't call off her child. Still. Something loosens in her chest when she sees his lips brush over Becca's forehead, when the girl is sleeping, and the shadows creep back, just a little. 

"What is it?" she asks, then, and Bucky looks at her. 

Death stares at her from her son's familiar cold blue gaze. 

"Sarah Rogers is dying," he says. 

~*~ 

"You could stop it," Steve says, once. He knows. Of course he knows, he's been living with Bucky at his side since they were children, has watched his friend Reap animals and the very sick, has watched darkness cloak his steps and laughter brighten his eyes, and he _knows_ when Death reaches out. 

"Stevie," Bucky murmurs. 

Steve looks at him, eyes bright and angry and Sarah sleeps, restless between them, a parody of those first nights they spent together. 

"It's not fair," he says, fierce. 

"I know," Bucky says, because it's not. 

~*~ 

"Will you take care of him?" Sarah asks. 

Steve sleeps between them, curled against Bucky's side, like if he holds Bucky down with his slight weight, Bucky _can't_ take Sarah. 

"He'll need someone, after--" Sarah says, and Bucky nods, choking back his tears and regret. "You've always been good for him. Even if you aren't what I would have chosen for his companion--you've loved him." 

"You know," Bucky breathes and Sarah smiles, and he sees Steve in her sharp eyes and the sassy curve of her lips. 

~*~ 

She leaves in the night, slips away to the hospital while Bucky is wrapped around Steve. 

She goes where neither can touch her, where she will die, Reaped by another, and there's a spark of relief in Bucky for that mercy, and a spark of fury too, because she ran from _Steve_. 

Steve who sits curled in his lap, his bony shoulders hunched and his eyes blank, and they wait. 

~*~ 

The paper curls between them, and Bucky feels, for the first time in all their years together, uncertain and unwelcome. 

"I thought--I thought since you were mine, it made us safe. Made _her_ safe. It doesn't seem fair--" 

"Stevie," Bucky says, helpless. "I would have stopped it, if I could." 

Steve is quiet, still and broken in his arms, and Bucky clings to him, as the shadows twist around them. 

~*~ 

Bucky moves in with Steve, slips easily into his space with Sarah gone. It’s easy, comfortable being there, where he is known. Steve has never been scared of him, even when he _should_ have been, and in their quiet little apartment without hot water or enough blankets, he is _himself._

He lingers in the shadows and he laughs with Steve, dotes on him the way he knows is frowned upon when they leave the safety of their apartment. 

Steve never complains, though. He basks in it, accepts Bucky’s attention like his due, and grows petulant and sulky when he withdraws. 

They traipse through the streets once a week for dinner with Fred and Becca, and Bucky finds work at the docks, and Reaps what he needs to remain healthy and they are--for a time, for a perfect endless, infinitely short time-- _happy_. 

~*~ 

Peace shatters with the bombs raining down on Pearl Harbor and Steve’s eyes, wide and furious, and Fred’s hand on his wrist, hot and afraid. 

“You have to go,” Steve tells him, while Fred whispers furiously that he _can’t._

Death is a shadow on the horizon, a siren song that stretches over the ocean that he can’t ignore. 

“You gotta,” Steve tell him, when he’s rejected by the Army again. There’s furious tears in Steve’s eyes and a bruise forming under his eye, and a body cooling behind them as Bucky steers him from the alley. 

“Buck, you gotta _go_ ,” Steve tell him, seriously. 

~*~ 

Bucky, Steve named him, and leashed him, made him _his._

Barnes, Fred named him, and stayed his nature, made her _his_ and him _hers_. 

But for all that he is named and Claimed and tamed--he is still a creature bound by his nature and his needs. 

~*~ 

“Will you protect him,” he asks and Fred blinks at him. 

“Buck, no one has ever been able to protect Steve Rogers but you. You know that,” she says and it’s almost caustic, but for the gentleness in her eyes. 

“Please,” he asks, begs, “I can’t--I can’t leave him, not if I don’t _know.”_

She sighs.

“I’ll do what I can,” she promises, and it’s enough. 

It has to be enough. 

~*~ 

He goes to basic training and they don't train him so much as discover him, discover what he can do, the natural affinity he has for Death. 

They put a gun in his hands and Bucky can kill, better than any they've ever seen. It's satisfying, and terrifying, and they keep him there, training, teaching him to be the best sniper the Army can shape, a harbinger of death for the troops he'll lead. 

They promote him, make him a Sergeant and send him home to Steve for a few days before he boards a ship to go to the front. 

"You'll be safe, won't you? Steve asks, and Bucky looks at him, this boy who named him, who he has loved and protected and claimed. 

Who claimed him in return. 

"I'll come back for you," he promises, and Steve smiles. 

"Better make it quick or I'll come after you first," Steve says and Bucky knows it's true. 

He catches Steve by the hip in the morning, as he's shouldering his rucksack and turning toward the door. Steve's red-eyed and stoic and Bucky doesn't--

He doesn't want their goodbye on a train platform surrounded by a million other soldiers leaving their sweethearts. 

He wants to remember Steve here, in the small comfort of their quiet apartment, his shirt too big on Steve's familiar frame, hair hanging in his eyes, lips soft and--

Oh. 

_Oh._

It feels like a sunrise, that little puzzle piece knowledge slotting into place, something so familiar he’s always known, and so new it leaves him almost breathless. 

He catches Steve by the hip and tips his chin up and covers his mouth, and Steve--Steve makes a noise, shocked and desperate and hungry, a noise that Bucky never knew he wanted to hear, and can't understand how he lived without and Steve shivers as Buck catches his lip with his teeth, drags over it and licks away the sting. 

"You be safe and stay outta trouble," Bucky whispers, hoarse, and Steve's eyes are dazed and shadowed and beautiful. 

He leaves him there, and carries the memory with him--of the beautiful boy who named him, mouth red and wet and swollen, wrapped in his shirt and barefoot and waiting for him. 

It carries him across an ocean and into the land of death.


	4. Into the Land of Death

He's given command of twenty men, all dirty and weary, and watching him with hostile eyes as he steps into their midst, fresh faced and clean. 

Death clings to them and for a heartbeat, staring at them, he thinks they are like him, that they are Reapers the way he is. 

The shadows shift, and the fog burns off, the morning sun burning it away and they're normal, regular men with too much blood on their hands, watching an unproven Sergeant with no reason in the world to trust him. 

~*~ 

It takes less than a month for Bucky to realize that things like  _ rank _ and officers don't mean shit in war. 

It takes less than a month for the 107th to go through a captain and a major and--very briefly, so briefly the man was dead before Bucky even heard about him--a lieutenant. 

His men don't trust officers with shiny uniforms and boots, who haven't got the stench of blood and battle in their skin, because those men--they die. 

Bucky saves Dum Dum Dugan in the middle of their first battle, and their medic the second, takes the worst shift for watch, and realizes one morning--when Gabe calls him Sarge, all warm and fond--that these men. 

They're  _ his _ . 

The way that Steve was his, the way that Fred was. 

He was  _ theirs _ , and they were  _ his _ , and here in this place of death--they'd survive together. 

~*~ 

He writes Steve. 

It's careful, framed as a story, a story he's never heard but one that feels like truth, a knowledge that settles in his bones. 

About names and claims, about leashing a monster with love and how that monster can become more, can become-- _ almost _ \--human. 

He tells Steve a story, about a monster who walks in shadows and the men who walk with him and he promises to come home. 

~*~ 

He likes the name he's given. He likes the name Bucky, his first name, the one he loves best, the one  _ Steve _ gave him, that he knows down in his bones. 

He likes Barnes, the name that Fred gave him when blood still spread on the floor and shadows slipped around his feet, and her eyes were bruised and her lip busted, and she stared at him like she trusted him. 

He likes Sarge, rolling confident off the tongues of Mortia and Dum-Dum and Gabe, likes the familiarity in the way they speak to him, the way that they never treat him like  _ other _ . 

He loves his names. 

He loves the ones who named him. 

~*~ 

The squad survives and survives, and survives. They gain a reputation in the 107th--gold touched and invincible. The men in the Sarge's unit don't  _ die _ . They're still in hell, just like the rest of the idiots fighting this goddamn war--but they're cared for by a NCO who looks out for them, who watches over them from his sniper's nest, who trades away his smokes and his chocolate and once, rumor says, the last pair of socks he had, to get his men what they need. 

They're invincible. 

Until they're captured, right alone with the rest of the 107th, and marched into hell, and Bucky steps with them, into shadows that makes his stomach twist and he thinks--I am not the only Death here. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this one is tiny! I'll make up for it tomorrow with a long chapter. <3


	5. The Man Named Captain

Erksine looks at him the way that only his mother and Bucky had ever looked at him--like he's  _ special _ . Like he's worth  _ more _ . 

He isn't. Steve wants to explain it to him--that he's just a kid from Brooklyn who should have died a long time ago, that he only ever survived because Bucky loved him too much to Take him. 

He doesn't. There's a line he won't cross and he's never once shared Bucky with the world, not the truth of him--he's not going to start now, in the shadow of a war that will likely kill him. 

He wonders sometimes, when he's sore and lying in his bunk and some of the others are calling to each other about their sweethearts--he wonders about the kiss. 

He can feel it, still. 

The rasp of Bucky's scruff on his skin, the drag of sharp teeth over his lip and the quick wet dart of a pink tongue that he wanted, desperately, to suck on. 

It wasn't like he hadn't thought about it, before. He thinks sometimes, that he's spent most of his life thinkin' about kissing Bucky. 

He touches his lips, in his bunk and thinks about kissing Bucky again, in Europe. 

~*~ 

It hurts. 

It hurts but he's lived with hurt before, the ache in his chest, the tightness of his lungs, the agony of walking on bones too brittle, of standing straight with a spine that didn't want to. It  _ hurts _ , but he's lived with hurt his whole damn life, a constant companion that predates even Bucky.

Erksine is afraid. It could kill him, he knows--this procedure isn't exactly  _ safe _ . 

But he'd fallen on a grenade and he'd survived his childhood and he'll survive this too--he'll keep on surviving, until Bucky decides to Take him. 

He smiles into Erksine's fear and screams through the pain--and when he emerges--he's something  _ new _ . 

~*~ 

The girls like him. Peggy snorts when he tells her that--they run into each other when he and the girls go to DC, dancing for the President, and there she is, all red lips and knowing eyes. He draws her, once, and sends the sketch to Bucky because Buck deserves to see pretty things, and because Bucky'd always despaired of Steve finding a good girl to settle down with. 

He wonders if Bucky still wants him to settle down with a nice girl, or if they're allowed to want new things for each other now. 

The girls like him though. They teach him how to do their curls and makeup, and one long train ride to Santa Fe, they tell him about their sweethearts and paint his nails. He draws for them and tells them stories about Bucky and growing up in Brooklyn. 

"Do you wish you were there?" Betty asks, once, when the others are asleep, curled like kittens together, the scent of gin in the air. 

He looks at the stars and empty desert rushing past, thinks of Bucky a world away, thinks about this body, this life that won't be Taken, and says, soft and certain the way he has been since before the war began, the way he thinks maybe he was born, steady and unflinching, "Yes." 

~*~ 

When he is sent to Europe, it's to cheer the troops. It's too expensive to send all the girls, even if they all know that's what's going to cheer the men who've been away from their sweethearts for years, but Steve picks half a dozen--he picks Betty and she smirks at him, so like Becca for a moment he can't breathe--and they're sent to lift morale. 

It's not how he wanted to make it to the war. None of this is how it was supposed to be. 

The rank misery in the camps they tour--that isn't right either. There's none of the patriotism he's been singing about, none of the bright eyed idealism--there are only dead-eyed soldiers who stare at him like he's the enemy, and shadows, twisting at the feet of soldiers. 

He's never seen Death, not since Bucky stepped out of the shadows and into his life, but he knows them. 

He knows the way shadows cling and shift, the way Death follows and he meets those gazes, head on and hungry. 

He's  _ missed _ it, the heavy weight of Death, has missed  _ Bucky _ . And these Reapers who stare at him like he is prey, like he is theirs for the Taking--they aren't Bucky, couldn't even come close. 

But they're all he has, the closest he can come, and he revels in their gaze. 

~*~ 

They sing and dance their way through England, and into Italy, what the Allies hold of it, and in every crowd, he searches for a familiar face. The girls stop asking if he's alright. Betty seems annoyed with him, but she nudges him into his cues, and smiles when he shoos them back onstage to the sound of shouting and insults, and when it's over, when he hasn't found his Bucky in the sea of faces, they crowd around him, his girls, and let him lean against them, his big head on Betty's soft shoulder, her hair brushing his mouth, while the others wind around them, hold him close, and make him feel less alone. 

Sometimes, though--sometimes he wants to be alone. 

Sometimes he sneaks away and Dot smiles and covers for him and Hannah slips him a piece of charcoal and for a little while, he sits in silence with his paper and his pencil and his thoughts. 

He draws Bucky, because of course he draws Bucky. 

He draws cities they pass through and the tired dirty faces staring at him and shadows slinking along their edges and he sometimes draws the girls, his girls, and he wonders if he'll ever get to show them to Bucky.

He wonders where in Europe Bucky is. Some days it feels like he and the girls have been everywhere in the world and all of it is Steve chasing an apparition, and he thinks that he'll never catch him, because Bucky was never his, he was only a creature, otherworldly and beautiful, that Steve leashed for a time, and when that leash broke, Bucky ran and ran and ran. 

He thinks a lot of things, stupid and silly and lonely. 

And then Peggy arrives, and with a careless word, tips his world upside down.

~*~ 

He's scrambling for gear, and everything at hand is a silly prop and it's not enough, not with Bucky out there, waiting and hurt and--

He shoves the fear aside, breathes through it and snatches up Betsy's helmet. Turns and runs headlong into Peggy, watching him with wide eyes. "You're going. Into enemy territory--Steve," she starts. 

"You can't stop me, Peg," he says, gently, none of the fury he wants to scream. 

None of the raging fear. 

She huffs, but her shoulders twitch straight. "How about I help you?" she says, and his heart lifts. 

~*~

Howard Stark is loud and brash and his plane rattles around them, noisy in the dark night. 

"Why you doin' this?" Steve asks, just before they take off and Howard looks at him, eyes bright and smile sharp. 

"You know I worked with Erksine. Not just that day--I helped him with his research, creating the serum." 

"Thought you made weapons," Steve says, and Howard's smile goes razor bright. 

"Maybe I wanted to create something that doesn't destroy," he says, and nods as Peggy climbs into the plane. "Strap in, Cap, this is gonna be bumpy." 

It's just as rough as Howard promises, a mad flight through the night and Peggy clings to her side of the tiny table she's spread the map across. "You're going into enemy territory. We can't send men after you," she says. "If you're successful, it's not just freeing them--you'll need to make it back to safety. Radio us, when you can, and we'll do what we can to get you home." 

He nods and stares at the map. At the little spot where she says Bucky is. 

"You know this is suicide, Steve," she says, gently. "The chances of your succeeding, of you  _ surviving-- _ " 

"When I was born, the doctors told my ma I'd never see my first birthday," Steve says, softly. "Then they said I'd die before I turned five. That there was no point in sendin' me to school, I'd never live long enough for it to matter. Every cold was supposed to kill me, every winter. And every time I was supposed to die--Ma and Bucky kept me alive." 

He looks at her, at the wide eyes and the frightened set to her mouth, the disbelief startling and beautiful. "I'm alive when I shouldn't be. Walked side by side with Death my whole life. This, though? This won't kill me." 

"Why not?" she asks, and he shrugs. 

"Because I refuse to die until he's back where he belongs," he says. 

"We're coming up on your drop zone, Cap," Howard shouts, and he makes a joke, something crude and suggestive and Peggy flushes. Steve smiles, all bright encouragement and thinks as he jumps into the black whistling wind and the bombs going off, that she had looked, just for a moment, disappointed. 

Then he's falling, the wind ripping at him, and he wants to shout, wild and free, and he can just imagine Bucky's fury, when he hears about this.

~*~ 

He slips through the woods and into the camp in the back of a transport vehicle. The warehouse is otherworldly and eerie, unlike anything he’s ever seen--it’s stranger even than the basement lab where he was remade. 

There are no shadows here, no creatures lurking in them, but the place reeks of death, in a way that makes him uneasy, anxious in his skin. 

For the first time in years, he’s afraid, afraid of the touch of death because if it comes here, it won’t be stayed by Bucky’s claim, it won’t greet him as a friend. 

He slips into the rows of prisoners and he doesn't see Bucky, even as he answers questions and gives orders, his attention already shifted away from the men who are watching him with bemused curiosity. A man in a bowler hat catches his arm. "There are some--they took some of the men. They don't come back," he says, and it's gentle and urgent and Steve looks at him. 

Bucky isn't  _ here _ , and the other option--that he is dead--is too terrible to contemplate. "Where are they?" he asks, and the other man grimaces. 

He jogs away as the prisoners begin to escape, jogs deeper into the warren of halls and rooms that are empty and dark. 

There's a familiar quality to the darkness, though, a welcoming of the shadows that was missing in that giant room of weapons and blank-faced men. 

These are shadows he  _ knows _ . 

He glances into an empty war room and for a moment--a heartbeat--the map catches his attention, snags it  _ hard _ . 

He takes a half-step closer, the urge to fight, to  _ help _ , almost overwhelming. 

There's a noise, something so soft it's almost unnoticed. 

A voice, so familiar he would know it in any place. A voice that has called him, cursing and grumbling, back from the very edge of death and it's calling him now. He turns, the map and the world forgotten. 

Bucky is on his back on a metal table, his gaze unfocused, reciting his name, rank and serial number.

The shadows are almost  _ gone _ . 

His eyes, though. His eyes track Steve, and his mouth shapes his name, a dreamy smile twisting his lips. "Steve," he breathes. 

"Buck," Steve says. He pulls him from the table, into his arms and he fits there, different than before--Bucky is smaller than him, tucks up neat under his chin--but he's alive and he's  _ here _ . "I thought you were dead."

"I thought you were smaller," Bucky says, and there's wondering disbelief in his voice. 

Steve smiles. "C'mon," he says. 

~*~ 

Bucky watches him. The long walk back, with the other prisoners around them, in the dark woods where they stop for the night, while the others tell stories about the capture and their escape, Bucky is silent, and watchful, and the shadows around him swell and grow, slipping liquid black and alive. 

Steve doesn't mind, because Bucky's always watched him, and he's never wanted to be anywhere but Bucky's gaze. 

Now, though--he watches back. 


	6. The Men Touched by Death

He likes fighting with Steve. 

He hates that he likes fighting with Steve. The team is becoming something of legend, a small surgical team that could strike hard and fast, slip away with shadows. 

The Allies said they were blessed, that death couldn't touch Captain America and his Commandos. 

The Nazis said they were cursed, devils who ushered death to Hydra's doorstep. 

Bucky smiled, small and private and watched Steve through his scope, and killed anyone who came too close to him and knew that both were right. 

And wrong. 

Steve walked with Death, and Death did not touch him. 

~*~ 

He was different, after. 

Steve's differences are big and beautiful, broad shoulders and strength, the body to match the soul that Bucky had always seen, and no one else--besides Sarah--had ever noticed. 

Steve was a shining sun, had  _ always _ been a shining sun, but now he looked like it, impossible to not  _ see _ . 

Bucky--Bucky lived in shadows, was seen only because Steve dragged him from them and named him,  _ claimed _ him, and he wonders if Steve sees that he's different now. 

He wonders if Steve knows that no one lived, in those dark room with needles full of fire and poison, that he  _ should  _ have died there. 

He didn't. He is Death, and that doctor--that mad scientist--slid death into his veins and waited, breath bated, and Bucky  _ took _ it, and made it  _ his _ , and made it  _ stronger _ . 

The shadows never leave him, now, not unless he forces them away. Death calls, impatient and sometimes he slips away from Steve and the Commandos, slips into the dark of no man's land and steals a little, those marked and not yet Taken. 

He gluts himself, on mission after endless mission, and Steve watches him, pleased and proud and Bucky thinks if he  _ knew _ . 

If he knew about the needles and death and what Hydra has made him--Steve would never look at him again. 

~*~ 

The Commandos call him Sarge. 

It's a name he had been given, before they were taken, and he likes it, still, loves them, madly, loves that they  _ see _ Steve, love that they still trust him.

They call him Sarge, and he is  _ theirs _ , and he smiles, small and sweet in the midst of Hell, and Steve nudges him. "Are they yours?" he asks, once. 

"Not like you are," Bucky says, quick and easy, and undeniable. 

No one is his the way that Steve is. The idea of it makes his stomach turn and his hands itch to reach for him. 

Sometimes he thinks they know, the Commandos, that they wouldn't mind if their Captain and Sarge were caught neckin' in the woods beyond the camp perimeter. 

His hands sweat at the thought. Of claiming Steve that way, that  _ visibly _ . 

He hasn't touched Steve since he left him in their Brooklyn apartment, red-lipped and dazed, and that moment feels like seconds and lifetimes ago. 

He sees Steve watching him, and he watches Steve because he's never been able to resist watching Steve--but death, strange and unfamiliar, snakes in his veins, and he keeps himself from reaching out. 

He keeps himself from brushing that tainted touch against Steve. 

~*~ 

He forgets that under the big body, under the uniform and the polite captain, there is  _ Steve _ , the boy who lay in Death's embrace and never flinched, who named and leashed Death and smiled at him like a friend. 

Steve's never backed down from a fight in his life, never once flinched away from what he should. 

Bucky walks their camp in the shadows and feels Steve's gaze on him, heavy and intent. He lays curled near the fire and wakes to Steve pressed against his back, and Dum-Dum's knowing smirk. 

Steve cajoles him into training, teases him into sitting near the others, throws himself, headlong and reckless, into danger and trusts that Bucky will wade in after him, cursing and angry, killing anything that threatens him. 

"Should let them kill you," he grumbles, once and Steve grins at him, star-bright and beautiful in his dirt and grim. 

"You won't," he says, cocksure. 

"Might. You're more trouble than your worth, Cap." 

Steve smirks and leans into him, a press of broad chest and heavy muscle and the dirty sweet scent of  _ Steve _ under the stench of blood and death. "But I'm  _ yours _ and you'd never let anyone else take me."

His whisper is a breath over Bucky's lips, a tease, and his words are a fire to tinder, sparking fury hot and jealous and Steve laughs, and darts away.

~*~ 

They get a night off in Paris. 

Carter finds them rooms in a hotel that's taken some damage but is better than the endless forests they've been tramping through for the better part of six months. 

Then she turns the Commandos loose on a bar, and they proceed to get rip-roaringly drunk. 

Steve watches, a loose smile on his lips, while Dum-Dum and Mortia flirt with the girls who dance in the hall, while Denier and Jones seem locked in a drinking competition that will end with both passed out on the floor by the end of it. 

There is still blood on his boots and a beer in his hand that has nothing to do with the hot rush in his blood, the thrill that he can't quite shake. 

Steve is watching him, lips curled and knowing and Bucky wants to step closer, wants to drag him into his space, until the Commandos and French girls and  _ Carter _ knows who the hell Steve belongs to. 

He drinks his beer and licks his lips, watching as Steve's gaze goes hungry and desperate. 

When Steve follows him into the streets, he isn't surprised. 

When Steve presses him into a brick wall, scorched with fire, he doesn't fight it. 

When Steve kisses him, hard and biting and desperate, he clings to broad shoulders that feel strange--they should be narrow and thin--and  _ right _ , and bites at his mouth, and moans when Steve snarls. 

"I gotta bed," Steve pants. "Buck,  _ please _ ." 

He can taste Steve, heavy on his tongue, and blood and Death in the air, and clinging to him. 

Tomorrow, they'll turn to the Alps, and one last mission, and Bucky  _ knows _ , it won't be. 

There is no such thing as one last mission. 

"Yeah," he says, thickly. "Yeah, sweetheart. Take me to bed." 

~*~ 

They walk back together, Steve presses against Bucky's shoulder, a move so familiar it makes him smile, makes some of the fire raging in his belly quiet. This is easy, being next to him, walking protective and protected at his side. This has  _ always _ been easy. 

Stepping out of the streets and into the privacy of Steve's room--small, square, a rickety wall and almost no security, even the damn lock was flimsy--is not easy. Settling into the heated gaze that Steve fixes on him, is not easy. 

Being pressed by a body that is still big and unfamiliar and heavy against that damn rickety door and his mouth covered by Steve--

That is like  _ breathing _ . 

Bucky whines, small and needy and Steve smiles, nips at his lower lip and licks into his mouth, all sweet and careful, maddingly careful, like Bucky is precious, breakable. 

Steve's hands are gentle on his shoulders, fingers almost ghosting over Bucky, like he's  _ afraid _ , like Bucky is pure and any touch will ruin him. 

Steve is the only person who has ever touched him like that. Like he's infinitely precious. Like he is  _ lucky _ to be touching Bucky at all, when everyone else who he's pressed against a dark wall or rickety door has been grasping hands and impatience, demanding and selfish. 

He whimpers into the kiss and almost moans when Steve moves away, when he kneels and fumbles Bucky's pants open. 

He bites down on his lip to keep from screaming as Steve takes his cock, hot wet heat and a nimble tongue, and pleasure so bright it makes his eyes sting. His hands are in Steve's hair and Steve hums around him, pleased, and Bucky makes a choked noise as he comes. 

When Steve kisses him again, he tastes himself on his tongue. 

"Want you to fuck me," he mumbles and Steve groans, thick and heavy, ruts against his hip helplessly. 

"Please," Bucky says, "Stevie." 

"Yeah," Steve whispers against his throat. He bites down, just enough that Bucky's hips twitch up and he groans, and then he's pulling away and fumbling for lube. 

It's strange and familiar, when Steve finally has him stretched open, when he finally  _ finally _ fucks into Bucky. He's sprawled across the narrow bed, and Steve is impossible big between his legs, his cock a thick and heavy and splitting him open and Steve is watching him, eyes bright and reverent. 

"I love you," he says. 

Bucky wonders, as he says it, if he ever has before. Steve makes a noise, all punched out and  _ hurt _ and fucks into him  _ hard _ , hard enough to drive him up the bed, and Bucky--

Bucky wraps his legs around Steve, digs his nails into Steve's shoulder and says it again. "I love you." 

It's fast. 

And slow. 

Rough and hard and tender. 

It's  _ Steve _ , fucking him, filling him, claiming him in this way that no one ever has before, and it's  _ right _ , because Steve has always claimed him first and best. He  _ named _ Bucky, and made him his, and this--this is just a part of that. 

~*~ 

Steve falls asleep after, curled around him, and Bucky lays wide eyed and happy in his arms and plans their next mission. 

Carter is sending them to the Alps. 


	7. Death Sings a Song

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mind the tags, friends!

When he licks his lips, he can taste Steve. He's loose and happy, even here, on the edge of nothing, with wind whistling so sharp it rips away his shadows, with his team around him, and Steve grinning at him, so bright he  _ hurts _ to look at, Bucky is happy. Death sings, a lovely siren song whistling along the tracks and he can taste Steve on his lips, and feel the ache of him in his body, the warmth of Steve curled against his body a lingering heat. 

He loves Steve. 

He's always known that--since Steve stared at him, all bright eyed and defiant on his sick bed, clinging to his mother's shirt with a stubborn strength, he knew he'd never love anyone the way he loved Steve, whole and complete and mindless. 

This new twist to  _ them _ , the pressure of Steve pressing him into the mattress, the warmth of Steve's mouth around his cock, the sharp sweet brightness of Steve's eyes staring at him when Bucky thrust into him, smooth and pliant and sweet--it's  _ right _ . 

It sings in his bones, the way that only Death ever has. 

"When this is over," he says, because this--this mission is the beginning of the end, and they'll go home, back to Brooklyn, back to Fred and Becca and their little apartment, and Steve's bright smiles in the morning and work on the docks. "We'll go home, right? We'll be happy? Together?" 

Steve's eyes soften, staring at him, an eternity in those familiar sky for miles blue. 

"Yeah," Steve says. Bucky grins, and the train screams below them. 

~*~ 

The shadows cling to him. 

Shadows have clung his whole life, a welcoming darkness, and they wreathe him now, and his moves liquid darkness and death, following in Steve's wake, protecting him and Death doesn't touch him. 

Death has never touched Steve, because Bucky has never allowed it. 

The shadows cling to him, and they twist,  _ twist _ , and he feels it, a wave of black shadows before the world explodes into whistling wind and Steve screaming his name and Bucky can feel them  _ ripping _ at him, the shadows ripping at him while he clings to the edge of the train, the ripped metal digging into his hand, blood making his grip go slippery. 

Steve is leaning out, and Bucky watches him, fear bright and coppery on his tongue. Shadows. 

Shadows and shadows and  _ death _ sings, siren sweet and alluring, and gods, he forgot how beautiful Steve's death song was, and no. 

_ No.  _

Not Steve. 

Death cannot have  _ Steve _ , because Steve--

Steve claimed him. He named him Bucky,  _ claimed  _ him, leashed him, a collar and chain forged of the gentlest links and Steve is leaning out, reaching, his voice desperate and Bucky can see it. 

They will die. 

They will  _ both _ die. 

_ No _ . 

He stares up at him, sky for miles blue that's been his home, that he loves. He stares at it, and he lets go, blood smeared and palm stinging, and falls, a rush of darkness. 

He falls, and all he can see is blue. 

Sky for miles. 

~*~ 

When they were young, and Steve was sick all the time, Bucky would sit by his bed and read to him while Sarah made dinner. And after, when the stories were tucked away and Bucky slipped with the shadows back through his window, silent so Sarah never knew--he'd tell Steve about Death. 

He spent endless nights, trying to explain the sound of Death, the way it whispered and sang, and  _ called _ to him. 

Standing in the train, where Bucky should be and isn’t, listening to the roaring wind and the thud of the tracks and his blood rushing under his skin--he can hear it. 

That fucking song, the one that Bucky used to get all soft and dream-eyed about, and it's--it's screaming at him, a thunderous pulse, and he wants to follow Bucky over the edge of the train, into the yawning nothing. 

Gabe is close, close behind him, grief and rage bright in his eyes, and he says, "Cap." 

He says, "We have Zola." 

He says, "I'm sorry." 

He does the hardest thing he’s ever done, while Gabe watches and the world rips by. 

Steve turns away from the screaming song. 

~*~ 

They go back to London and Zola is handed over to Phillips and Carter. The Howlies eye him with concern, and he--

Steve turns, away from it, from the cautious concern and offers of drink, of memories that are so fresh they barely count as history and it's not  _ fair _ , because Bucky was never just his. 

Bucky belonged to him  _ first _ , but he belong to Fred and Becca, to the Howlies, to everyone who named him and loved him, and--

Steve stalks away from them, goes searching for Shadows, and it's only his face grinning back at posters that keeps him from screaming for death. 

He doesn't find it. Or maybe he does. Death shifts near him, close enough to recognize and brush against, but never close enough to Take him. 

He wants to rage, wants to  _ die _ , wants to follow Bucky this one last time. 

Death watches him and he thinks, sitting in a bombed out bar where they were happy, once, that he's still wearing Bucky's claim, a brand on his soul, and he thinks--maybe now he will never die. 

~*~ 

Peggy watches him. 

So do the Howlies. 

They don't  _ like _ his plan, and distantly, he knows it's foolish. Knows that rushing headlong into danger like this will kill him. 

He just doesn't  _ care _ . 

~*~ 

The thing is. 

The thing is, on the Valkyrie--there are no shadows. 

There's no  _ song _ . 

There is only silence, the thrum of the machine that is too sleek and deadly, that Bucky would have loved. There's the hum of the cube, glowing blue and seductive, and Red Skull's insane rambling, and there's the chaos of the fight. 

But after, when it is only him and the endless sky--the sun is rising. 

There are no shadows to dance with here, no Death song to sing. It's peaceful, and so beautiful, he tears up. 

Bucky would love it, he thinks. 

He tips the nose of the plane down, and he sighs, relief wrapped around him in the rising sun light, and there is no song and no shadows and no Death--but he goes into the water anyway, and waits, eager and impatient, for Death to Take him. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I KNOW!!! I know, ok, but look. Daily updates til it's done, y'all. I'm fixing it!


	8. Into the Land of Dreams and Nightmares

The letter sits on her table for three days, until Becca comes home for Sunday dinner and finds it sitting there, where Bucky should sit, and her eyes, wide and scared, find Fred's. 

They heard the news, of course. 

Everyone in New York and on the East Coast had heard the news, about Steve Rogers putting a plane in the ocean to stop bombs from devastating the American coast. About being listed as missing in action. About the rescue effort that was launched and the way the Axis forces were faltering as America and her allies pushed forward, hard and relentless. 

They didn't hear about Bucky. 

Unless it was a Captain America newsreel, they didn't get much in the way of news about Bucky. They got letters, familiar and battered, his messy scrawl across them, and they saw glimpses and pictures of him next to Steve. 

Fred thinks, that's where he always belonged, it makes the best kind of sense that it's where he is, still. 

This letter--it's different. 

The handwriting is elegant and neat, artistic almost, and her name is precise and officiant. 

"Ma," Becca breathes and she trembles, just for a moment. 

When she closes her eyes, she can see a boy, small and feral, smiling from shadows and stepping over a pool of spreading blood to stare at her, all serious and beautiful and protective. 

Her boy. 

She opens the letter and Becca comes to lean against her side, as she reads. 

_Fred & Becca, _

_I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I tried--_

_I'm doin' this wrong._

_James 'Bucky' Barnes was killed in action, serving under my command, this morning. He served with distinction, and saved my life. The United States owes you a debt we can never repay._

There is a water spot on the paper, and she realizes, abruptly, that Steve cried, writing this. 

She closes her eyes, against the swell of pain. Bucky was his, first. How will he survive, without Bucky. 

_I am sorry. I am so goddamn sorry, Ma. I'm sending along his pay, of course, and you got my own checks, and I--I'll come home. I'll help you, however you need. Whatever you need. I can't bring him home, but I'll be with you, Becca and you both. I'm not Bucky, but I'll do what he can't._

_You don't gotta forgive me for this. I wouldn't._

_He loved you so much, Ma. Loved you both._

_I miss him so much it hurts_

Becca is crying, great big shaking things, curled around her knees, a keening noise caught in her throat and Fred thinks she should lift her little girl up and hold her, tell her that they'll survive this. 

They will. They're Barnes, they're Bucky's family, and they survive and _live_ , even when the world says they shouldn't. 

But in this moment, Steve's words blurring in her teary eyes, and the room bright and shadow free, she doesn't lift Becca up and reassure her. 

For just a moment--she weeps for her son. 

~*~ 

He dreams. 

He dreams of streets washed with sunshine and shadows, and Bucky at his side. He dreams of walking in the night, Bucky following a song he cannot hear, and spending long afternoons on the docks, listening to the water and the men shouting back and forth and Bucky pointing out clouds. 

He dreams of the summer they snuck into the stands and watched a baseball game and Buck spent the last few pennies he had to buy them hotdogs, and later took Steve to Coney Island. 

He dreams of the nights he followed Bucky, and the shadows that twisted around him, dreams of walking hand in hand with Death and it was never terrifying, and he dreams of walking there again. 

He dreams and his dreams are cold, cold cold. 

~*~ 

He dreams, sometimes. 

The cold leeches into his skin, settles in his bones, the bones he has left, and warps his dreams into funhouse nightmares, like the mirrors in the hall of mirrors he took Stevie too, once. 

They twist the dreams, warp them into nightmares, and memories get tangled up, thick as tar and snaring. 

He dreams of Steve laughing and choking, coughing and coughing and he tries to say Bucky's name, but it comes out a frothy bubble of blood. 

He dreams of nights in the streets, and Steve's skin pale and bloodless and the shadows twisting around them. 

He dreams of Fred cooking, her hands bloody stumps like his shoulder, and shadows twisting around her, turning her into a nightmare creature that screams his name and Becca is a cackling hyena that falls on him, laughing his name in her endless shriek, her teeth digging into his throat and ripping him apart. 

He dreams and the dreams are nightmares and there is no reprieve there, and he wakes to hell and longs for nightmares filled with Steve. 

~*~ 

In some of his dreams, Bucky is lying in his bed, warm and sunkissed, smiling down at him as he presses kisses to Steve's open mouth, licks in and swallows Steve's moans. In some of his dreams, Bucky slips down his body and whispers sweet words, drizzles them like honey over his belly and into the crease of his hips, calls him sweetheart and darling and baby doll, calls him _love_ and Steve sighs and when Bucky takes him in his mouth, he moans and thrusts up into that delicious warm heat and Bucky smirks around him and it's that, the feel of that smile he's loved, that makes him come. 

In his best dreams, Bucky spreads his cheeks and licks his hole, fucks him open with tongue and teeth and fingers, before he slides into the warm hot secret places of him, and Steve presses back and the shadows are sweet and welcoming and cover them as they fuck and Bucky comes with a groan and splash of heat, claiming and claimed, and Bucky calls him a thousand names, sweet and adoring, and Steve only ever calls him _Bucky_. 

~*~ 

He dreams. 

He dreams and they are nightmares, and they are better, so much better than the nightmare hellscape he wakes to. 

He wakes to an arm being sawed away. 

He wakes strapped to a medical table and needles, to Zola's voice and sickly smiles, and Death, screaming a song he doesn't know, doesn't want to hear. 

He wakes and prays for Steve, because Steve would never leave him here.

He wakes and they're fixing an arm to his shoulder, metal and gleaming and bleeding shadows and it _hurts_ to see because he has never never wanted to be Death, not like _this_. 

He wakes, and they throws wrinkled old newspapers at him, a familiar face, a tragic unbelievable headline and

he

 _breaks_.

He screams and he _kills_ , Reaps them **_all_ ** until a needle brings icy cold and rushing darkness. 

~*~ 

He wakes

_and_

He wakes 

_and_

He wakes 

_and_

The nightmare 

Never 

Fucking 

_Ends_. 

~*~ 

Time doesn't mean anything here. He's alive, but he doesn't want to be. The strap him down and rip him apart and Zola watches, bright eyed and terrifying, while he doesn't die. 

There are shadows, sickly and strange, and he screams sometimes, for Steve and for Fred, and as time dwindles and the guards change and doctors age and hands that hurt him never change, not truly--he screams less for the people he loves, for his _family_ , and screams for the Reapers who turned their backs on him, screams for those who might give him the one thing he still longs for. 

He screams and the hands hold him down and pour liquid fire in his veins, fix a metal arm to his stump. 

He screams and a soothing, _cutting_ voice digs into his head, and rewrites what he _knows_. 

He screams and the handlers whisper Words, and they shock him until his screams go silent, and they train him, train him to kill. 

Not to reap. 

To _slaughter_. 

He screams and eventually, even that goes still and quiet. 

~*~ 

They call him Asset. 

They call him Soldat. 

They call him _it_ and _tool_ and _Fist of Hydra_. 

They call him the Asset and it's a name, and he shudders under it, and wonders why he knows this feeling, this sensation of being Named, of being _Claimed_. 

The words etch into his brain, painful and binding and he shudders under them, and they look at each other, cautious and hopeful in this room empty of shadows. 

They call him Asset and Soldat and he stares blankly back. 

"готов соблюдать"

~*~ 

The thing called Asset Soldat Tool and--once, once, briefly, a red haired girl with a sphinx smile laughed and called him Yasha as she danced around him, a steel blade loose and sure in her fist--walks through Hydra's base and sheds shadows. 

He walks into the world and sheds blood and slaughters what enemies Hydra puts before him. 

He stares down the scope at a man smiling in a car and sees shadows in the sunlight, and the longing in him makes no sense. 

He pulls the trigger and he pulls the trigger and he pulls the trigger. 

He kills because he is a weapon, he is the Asset, the name a chain around his neck and sometimes, watching the life of Hydra's enemies slip away, he thinks he was meant to be more than this. 

~*~ 

Shadows spook the Asset. 

He will still, watching them shift and stir and sometimes, a word will slip free of him, one that doesn't mean anything, that doesn't make sense. 

"Fred?" 

His handlers shift and whisper and he watches the shadows dance, head tilted as if listening to something only he can hear. 

They strap him to the chair and he screams against his bite guard and the shadows drift away, burned back by white hot pain. 

~*~ 

He sleeps in ice, and dreams of blue. 

Dreams of dancing shadows and a song he cannot hear and sky for miles blue. 

~*~ 

They wake the Asset in a room bright and sterile, wake him with cold perfunctory hands on gauges and voices calling out readings and his heartbeat pounds, too fast, and his eyes are bright with fear and pain, but no one ever writes that down, or even comments on it. 

They don't comment on the shadows swirling through the bright lit room, either, the way they snake around him and the Asset watches them, childlike and hopeful.

They recite his Words before he can scream, and watch him go stiff, a rictus grimace on his face. 

They write that down. 

~*~ 

They wake the Captain slowly, ease him from the icy tomb of the Valkyrie with gentle hands and shouted, twisting instructions that comes down, in the end, to this: be gentle. 

Be careful. 

They carry his body, cold and blue tinged still, to New York and Tony Stark stands next to his bedside and thinks about it, waking up alone, stranded in a century not his own. The Captain sleeps and his monitors beep, softly reassuring that his big, good heart still beats and Tony thinks--it's better this way. 

The world needs someone like Captain America. 

Still. 

"You poor bastard," he murmurs, and pats his shoulder before he retreats. 

~*~ 

He wakes and there is nothing there, in his mind, a peaceful blankness sitting side by side with white hot agony and he blinks at the Handler in front of him, a man with sharp eyes and a sharp tongue and a cruel face. 

"Target level 6," he says. 

"You will kill him, and his children, and you will make it messy," he says. 

"It's a statement, Soldat," he says, and the Asset blinks at him. 

He doesn't understand why he's told this. He doesn't understand how it assists the mission. 

He takes his weapons, lets his team strap him into his tac gear and his weapons and he walks in shadows to carry out his orders. 

~*~ 

He wakes and there are lies, lies piled on lies, and each of them are well-intentioned, for his safety, for the security of SHIELD--but they are lies, and pretty lies meant for his own good are still lies. 

He smiles and nods when Natasha talks, and when his therapist tells him he's adjusting well, and when Nick Fury tells him about the world and everything he's missed. 

He smiles and he nods and he sits next to Peggy's bed, because she has aged, and she isn't his, has never truly been his, but she's a friend, and she's never lied to him. 

"You can still help this world," she says, "but you don't owe us anything. Don't let Fury convince you that you do. You have given us more than we ever had the right to ask." 

She means his life, so readily laid down. 

He can't help but think of Bucky, of the one thing he never wanted to give up. 

"And if I want to help?" he asks, because he can't think about that, not now, not when the loss of Bucky feels like a still bleeding wound. Maybe, he thinks, not ever. 

"Then trust Tony," she says, smiling, like she knew all along what he would say. 

Maybe she did. "You won't like him, much--he's abrasive, and loud, but--" she smiles, fond. "He's a good boy. And he'll be honest with you." 

He nods. 

~*~ 

When he settles into his apartment in Avenger Tower, after the Chitauri and the Battle and fighting with Tony--Peggy would be so pleased she was right--he looks down on the city that feels like the furthest he's ever been from home and there are no shadows. 

This whole new world he's stumbled into feels empty of shadows. 


	9. A Man Out of Time

He lives there, in the Tower above the city he doesn't recognize, with a team he doesn't know, and he is  _ lonely _ . 

He turns down Tony's invitations to go to dinner, turns down Clint's offers to go to the range, turns down Natasha's demand for training. 

He doesn't turn Pepper down when she comes up to him with tickets to an art gallery exhibit, but those are silent affairs, the two of them drifting through the silent spaces and absorbing the art while she sips a glass of red. He always leaves before she does, slips out as she talks about commissions and pieces she wants to buy. 

Tony is, to very little surprise, the one who finally calls him on his shit, almost three months after he moved into the Tower. 

"I don't really know why you're here," he says one night. The others are sleeping or on a mission--Steve hasn't bothered to find out--and the shadows are dark, inky splotches across the light-bright city sprawled below them, and filling up the common room behind him, and Tony is standing in a pool of them, lit only by the glow of the city and the arc reactor. He's inscrutable and elegant and everything Steve doesn't understand about this world. 

"You don't want to be here, Cap--I get that. But if you don't want to be here, and you can't be when you want to be, what are you gonna do with your life? Are you just waiting to die again, because I gotta say--I expected better of you." 

He doesn't answer at first, and Tony makes an impatient noise. In the reflection, he watches him jerk his tie off, the motion impatient and almost angry, and he can see Bucky in that. 

He can see Bucky in  _ everything _ , and nothing and it's  _ killing _ him. 

"Will you go with me tomorrow?" 

It stills Tony, shocks him, and Steve both. He doesn't retract the question, even as Tony's eyes narrow at his back. "Where?" 

"I want to show you something," he says, and Tony nods.

~*~ 

Tony isn't  _ quiet _ as they drive across the bridge into Brooklyn, but he's not insistent about his chattering either, and Steve is quiet enough for the both of them. 

He does go quiet when they approach the cemetery, going very still when his driver turns them into Greenwood. 

"Walk with me," he says, and Tony hesitates for a heartbeat before he obediently follows Steve into the cool fall air, and through the quiet plots. 

They stop near a bench and Steve sits down, his gaze fixed in the middle distance. Tony follows his gaze, and finds a woman there. She's dressed in jeans and a black sweater and she's using a cane as she walks, her hair a white tumble down her back, holding a bouquet of daisies. 

"That's my only family," Steve says, softly. "Becca Proctor." 

"That's Barnes' baby sister?" Tony asks, following his gaze with new curiosity. 

"You know, she isn't? Not by blood--Fred adopted Bucky, a few months after I first met him. She and Becca always treated Buck like blood though. And that made me family, by proxy. She's the closest thing I've got, anyway." 

"Have you seen her?" he asks, softly and Steve shrugs. 

Shakes his head. 

"I can't. I--I can't go home to Becca after all these years, not when Bucky can't." 

He doesn't look at Tony, doesn't want to see the pity in the other man's eyes. He stares at the woman leaving flowers for her dead brother, the way she does every third Sunday of the month, and he tries to breath slow and deep. 

"I'm goin' to move to DC," he says, and Tony jerks, a little. "I'm gonna try working for SHIELD for a while." 

"Why?" 

_ Because if I don't, I'm gonna test how death-proof Bucky left me.  _

He doesn't say it. 

"I have to do something," he says and Tony sighs and nods, leaning against his shoulder as Becca turns away from the grave. 

~*~ 

He gets stabbed on his first mission with STRIKE. Rumlow, the team lead, gives him a wild-eyed stare as Steve rips the knife from his side, flips it with fluid familiar fingers and plunges it into the throat of the man attacking him. 

He finishes the mission, and on the flight home, he ignores the steady slide of blood on his abs, down his stealth suit, while his men look at him, all shock and awe. 

It's good, he thinks, distantly, fuzzy with pain, for them to understand just how comfortable with death and violence he can be. 

~*~ 

He runs in the mornings, while the world is sleeping and nightmares plague him, and shadows drench the capitol, and it's not even close to the past, but maybe  _ because _ it's so far from that, from Brooklyn and chasing Death with Bucky, it's peaceful and soothing. 

It's the quietest his mind gets, when he runs.

He notices the other man running too early and too hard on his second week in DC, and he doesn't always see him, but when he does, he can't look away, caught by the shadows that cling to him, and the way his ass moves and the snarl he gives up, kitten-like ferocity that tugs a grin at his Steve's lip as he runs. 

~*~ 

He gets shot twice, and he walks it off like the stab wound, and Rumlow pulls him aside, concern mixed with envy. "You don't gotta take all the punishment, Cap. We're a team--"

"It makes sense," he says, cutting him off. "I  _ can _ take it." 

"Even you can die, Rogers," Rumlow says, finger glancing off the bloody bullet hole in his shoulder. It's tender, still, and Steve struggles not to flinch away. He smiles instead, something tight and forced. 

"I'll be more careful," he says. 

~*~ 

"Rumlow thinks you have a death wish," Natasha says. She's wearing pink sweats and a thin tank top, her hair messy from sleeping on his couch, and he thinks, absurdly, of Becca, soft and sleepy and prickly in the mornings while Bucky cooked for them. 

"It's not the first time I've gotten shot," he says, shortly. 

"Not even the first time you've gotten shot this century," she agrees, and there's something about her tone that makes him bristle. He looks at her, and she arches an eyebrow. "You got a whole lot keeping you here, Rogers? Because until you do, you're gonna get that kind of concern when you throw yourself into life or death situations." 

"Pretty sure that's in the job description," he grits out. "Isn't that what Fury wants me for?" 

She frowns, and touches his hand as he passes her a mug of coffee. "No one at SHIELD wants you dead, Steve." 

He doesn't answer. He isn't sure what answer he could possibly give. 

~*~ 

She changes tactics, after that, stops giving him worried eyes and well meaning stilted speeches, and starts giving him phone numbers and he  _ knows _ she's trying to give him something  _ here _ , something to hold on to. 

He throws himself out of a plane without a parachute, and thinks that running away from a fight is new, but it's sure as hell not gonna convince Nat that he's well-adjusted. 

~*~ 

He throws himself at death, over and over, and it bounces him back, gentle and rough, bone breaking and bruising, and it never latches on and  _ takes _ , and as he treads water in the dark and climbs up the Lemurian Star, he wonders again, if he's able to die. 

He wonders if that reprieve was stolen away when Bucky died, if Death will take someone so clearly Claimed, even now. 

  
  
  



	10. Death on a Leash

SHIELD is lies poured on good intentions and a shifting sand foundation. 

He wants to trust Natasha, but she smiles, sphinx and cool, and lies to his face. Fury offers nothing but half-truths and excuses, and he hates it, hates that this thing that Peggy built has become a bed of spies and lies. 

"I want to show you something," Fury says, and tells him a story as they go, and it feels like he's being patronized, like this is all another act. 

The helicarriers are not an act. 

The helicarriers are gleaming and deadly, bright sharp lines and he looks at Fury, "This isn't the answer." 

"The world isn't what it used to be, Cap." 

He thinks of all the idiotic things people have told him since he came out of the ice--that's the top of the list. 

The differences of the world are stark and impossible to miss, but men trying their damndest to kill each other isn't one of them. 

~*~ 

His apartment is drenched in shadows and Fury looks like  _ hell _ , all the pretense and evasions stripped away, laid bare. 

His apartment is drenched in shadows and that--that  _ matters _ , more than Fury's words, because he  _ knows _ shadows, he knows them when they are still and natural and when they are liquid shifting things chasing Death. 

The bullet punching through the wall and through Fury and splashing blood across his walls--that's still a shock. 

Shadows flare, writhing and alive, and he can see the gunman as his fucking  _ neighbor _ crashes through his door, gun in hand and too calm, too professional to be anything else. 

He leaves them in the shadow-drenched darkness and chases the assassin. 

~*~ 

Natasha is afraid. 

Fury is dead, and Natasha is trembling and he's got a pocketful of secrets and a headful of an assassin who slipped away like  _ nothing _ , like he never even existed. It tugs at him, that man's winter-bright gaze, the metal arm gleaming as he caught Steve's shield, tugs at memories he does his damndest not to stir. 

The shadows had clung to him, had clung to the rooftop, and the thing is--Steve knows what causes that, had grown up with shadows that were unnatural and shifting and other--and he doesn't know why Death is stalking him again. 

~*~ 

The world falls away with that fucking mask, and Bucky stares at him, blank and unknowing, and on the sun-drenched street, there are no shadows, no rippling songs of death, just a man who should be dead, standing in front of him, and Steve wants to scream and wants to drag Bucky close, and wants to throw up--all of them at once. 

"Bucky?" he asks, voice trembling and he shouldn't sound like that, not when he's talking to Bucky, not ever. 

Something flickers in Bucky's eyes and his mouth settles into a frown just shy of petulant. "Who the hell is Bucky?" 

~*~ 

"Talk to me," Sam says, and Steve shrugs. 

"It was him," he says, softly. 

"But it's not," Sam says gently. "Whatever they did to him, man, that's not Bucky. That's not the man you knew." 

"Do you know, I named him that," Steve says, and he knows Sam is frowning, knows it's nonsensical, but he also knows--it's the only thing that matters. 

"I named him Bucky, and he never left me, after that." 

"Cap-" 

"I'll do what needs to be done," he tells Sam. Because he will. 

Because he  _ has _ to. 

He doesn't tell Sam that he'll die doing it. 

That Bucky coming to kill him is almost reassuring, because that was always going to be Bucky's task, and his friend is there, under that weapon HYDRA created, and Death coming for him, like the oldest friend he's ever known, is almost a relief, after all this time. 

~*~ 

_ Bucky _

The Asset can hear it's Handler's talking, the hum of the Chair, the sharp bite of orders that haven't taken hold yet, but he stands quiet and docile, and turns over that  _ word _ . 

The man on the bridge had said it, and it  _ tugged _ . Pulled at it, at the leash that the Handler's held, the same and different. 

The Handler's call it Asset, call it Soldat, call it Ghost Solider Winter  _ weapon _ . 

The man--a boy on thin blankets with sky for miles eyes and a stubborn chin--calls it  _ Bucky _ . 

Bucky slips over him, a caress. 

It shivers, and the techs nudge it into the Chair, and it opens its mouth for the bite guard, and the shadows around it  _ writhe _ , and a small voice demands stories and a brusque woman calls the name  _ Barnes _ , and it thinks--

They are  _ memories _ . 

They are  _ it's  _ memories. 

~*~ 

It remembers this: 

The feel of metal under it's flesh hand, and crumpled bones under it's metal fist. 

The beating heat of the sun and the dust of the road and the flare of red as it's target died. 

The dead in their beds and the cries of dying, and the shadows that walk with it, everywhere it goes. 

The girls, two neat rows of dead-eyed girls with deadly hands and biting bodies and smiles that lie. 

It remembers this: 

A boy, sunshine hair and sky blue eyes. 

A woman, bloody skin and belly full of baby and fierce. 

A baby girl, kicking and grinning and laughing. 

Men, dirty and rough and loud and deadly and  _ his _ . 

It remembers this: 

Shadows, shifting and dancing and chasing him. 

Death, writhing under his hand. 

A song, more beautiful than any he'd ever heard, and a screaming, seven centuries long and aching. 

It remembers this: 

_ Steve _

~*~ 

He remembers that he is a he, that he had a  _ name _ , that once--once his leash was held with gentle hands, that he was loved and  _ wanted _ . 

Pierce is standing next to Rumlow, and their hands are not gentle, have never been gentle. 

"Wipe him," Pierce says and he screams, and he screams, and he screams. 

It  _ screams _ . 

~*~ 

"Soldat," the Handler says, sharp and it  _ shudders _ , and jerks, twists to stare at him, eyes blank and waiting. 

It thinks once, it was called with love, leashed with kindness, followed out of devotion. 

It stands at attention and accepts it's orders, and it  _ aches _ . 

~*~ 

Sunshine shaded scarlet, sky for miles filled with storms, and that  _ name _ , the one that shatters against it, that cuts at it, that breaks at  _ it's  _ name, and with every blow--the leash that holds him frays. 

"Bucky," he says, and the Asset shudders. 

"You're my friend," he says and the Asset screams. 

"I'm your friend," he says. 

"I'm with you til' the end of the line," he vows. 

"I'm your friend," he pleads. 

"Bucky," he prays. 

It-- **he** \-- _ screams _ . 

~*~ 

And the leash- 

**_Snaps_ ** . 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last two chapters will post tomorrow, because the final is a short epilogue!


	11. The Weight of his Name

Natasha brings him a file and she says, "Don't pull on this string." 

She brings him a file and a warning but she walks away with it in his hands, and he figures she knows him enough now, to know what he's gonna do with that. 

He doesn't just pull on the string--he yanks on it, rips all the secrets from the shadows and into the light. 

He spends three days reading and it takes that long because every few pages he has to stop and throw up or tear something apart, or sometimes both. 

Then, he goes to Tony. 

~*~ 

This is the truth--

They named him. They stripped him down, broke him to pieces, and they put him back together, a man torn apart and a weapon pieces back together, and when they had--they named him. 

Steve reads and he reads, everything Tony gives him, everything Natasha digs up, and there's nothing that says Hydra knew what they were doing. 

They didn't  _ know _ that Bucky was a Reaper, that naming him was placing a collar around his throat and leashing him to their will. 

He can't figure out if that makes the decades of torture and servitude better or worse. 

~*~ 

There's fury, a rage that wants to burn the world for everything that Bucky suffered. 

There's longing, too. 

Because he spent two years grieving, two years barely living, utterly alone and convinced he couldn't die, that Death wouldn't Take him because he was claimed by another, and he longed for it,  _ wanted _ Death's cool touch because he knew it, and had never felt safer than he did, under Bucky's hand. 

And now--now he longs for life, lived at Bucky's side, a life that was promised to both of them and snatched away by war and duty. 

They are old, now, the both of them, old men trapped in young men's bodies, and he is tired and he wants the life they were promised, that they promised each other. 

~*~ 

He tells Sam the night before they leave for Europe. 

About shifting shadows and names that were more than names, about songs and Death smiling from the darkness and a best friend who was more, so fucking much more than the history books said. 

Sam blinks, and scrubs a hand over his face. "So Barnes--he's not just the most dangerous assassin the world has ever seen--he's actually a Death harbinger?" 

He sounds  _ exhausted _ , but not disbelieving and Steve stares at him, cautious. 

"You can't do anything halfway, can you," Sam sighs. 

"You believe me?" Steve asks, startled and Sam shrugs. 

"Man, aliens fell out a hole in New York, and a man who took a seventy year nap helped save the city. I stopped honest to god  _ Nazis _ from killing millions of people with ships built with my own damn tax dollars. You tellin' me your boyfriend from the forties is a boogyman isn't the weirdest shit to happen this week." 

Steve laughs, startled and Sam flashes a grin at him, pleased. 

"I never told anyone," he admits. "I think the Howlies knew he was-- _ some _ thing was different about him. But we never told them." 

"Why tell me?" Sam asks, and Steve shrugs.

"He's dangerous. You got a right to know what we're trying to put a leash on." 

"You keep sayin' that. After all those years, wearing Hydra's leash--you sure that's what's best for him?" Sam asks, cautiously and Steve--

Steve shrugs. Shakes his head and smiles, soft and sad. "I don't, actually. But my leash isn't like theirs, and it was always one Bucky  _ wanted _ . All I can do is offer that to him, again." 

"And if he doesn't want it?" 

Steve doesn't answer. 

He doesn't have an answer. Not one that Sam wants to hear, not one that he can put into words, just yet. 

"Get some sleep," he says instead and Sam nods, gaze tracking him as he leaves the quiet kitchen. 

He sleeps, and his dreams are filled with shifting shadows and a cocky smile and a song, familiar and lovely.

~*~

The leash shatters. 

The leash shatters and it  _ hurts _ , a bright white hot pain that shakes him to his core. Steve-- _ Steve _ ,  _ Steve _ ,  _ Stevie _ \--is dying in the river, his mission, an order given to the Asset, and it stirs, the shattered shards of what they made him. 

He falls, and finds him in the river, and drags him out, the rattling shards of disobedience and orders cutting up his guts. 

He looks down, once, at Steve's ruined face and broken body and slack lips. 

And then, like a dog who slipped his collar--he runs. 

~*~ 

He remembers in bits and pieces. 

He remembers the Chair and Asset and Soldat, names that reverberate in his bones. 

He remembers Bucky, the name that calls to him, that fits the best, that soothes something he didn't know hurt. 

He remembers Steve and Brooklyn, and a little girl grinning, fire and fury in her eyes, and a woman with tired, ancient eyes that looked at him with love, and with it--

He shakes it away, the tug of memory, of Claim, and slips into a museum with Steve's face on it, and wanders through it. 

He finds Steve, there, the boy that he was, that Bucky loved, a lifetime ago, and his heart aches, because he wants to be those boys again--spite and rage wrapped up small and Bucky protecting him. 

He finds his mother there, the woman who became his mother, the girl who became his sister, the name Fred gave him. 

Barnes. 

Sarge. 

Bucky. 

Asset and Soldat and Winter. 

He shivers under it, the weight of everything he has been and the longing of what he wants to be, again. 

He turns away from the exhibit and makes his way across an ocean, and he's not running to a war, this time, to a land engulfed in death, reluctantly carried away from Steve--

This time, he's running  _ from _ Steve. 

~*~ 

He dreams in Europe. Dreams of wandering the streets of Brooklyn and Steve's smile, sunshine bright. Dreams of the war, of blood and shit and mud and the pressure of a trigger squeezed under his finger, and the body that fell every time. 

Dreams of falling and screams that never ended, a nightmare that never ended. 

He dreams and he wakes, retching, and wanders cities he knows but has no memory of, speaks languages he knows but doesn't remember learning, and the people--they call him friend and stranger and neighbor and sir. 

They don't call him by name. 

~*~ 

"You don't belong here," a girl says to him. She's watching him with narrow, assessing eyes and when he looks at her, she seems to  _ shift _ , twisting with the shadows, everywhere and nowhere all at once. 

"I don't belong anywhere," he says, instead of answering, and plants another tulip. It's soft and delicate under his metal fingers, and he has to be careful, careful, careful not to damage it. 

"You do," she says. "And there's still work for you, brother." 

He blinks up at her, dark spots in the sunlight, but when he can see against the too bright glare--she's gone. 

~*~ 

He takes a few days, planting tulips and searching for shadows, searching for something that looks right but  _ isn't _ , and he never does find. 

He takes a few days--and then he slips into black leather and heavy weapons and he goes to Reap. 

~*~ 

The first base is a hive of activity and he shifts through it silently. He was Hydra's favorite killer and seventy years of being a leashed assassin only made him  _ better _ at it. 

He slips through the base and kills everyone he finds, a silent specter, and drinks it down, their death a potent wine, their death song a screeching melody that does nothing to soothe his hunger or his soul, or his guilt. 

~*~

He storms three bases, slaughters his way through them and in the third, rips a Chair to pieces before he collapses, shivering and shaking, in his safe house. 

It isn't helping. 

He's stronger, better, than he ever has been, but it isn't  _ helping _ , doesn't sooth the screaming in his soul, settle the shadows writhing hungry at his feet. 

Death doesn't call him. He's a reaper, but the song is easy to tune out, and the voice he wants to hear--it doesn't reach him here. 

What, he thinks, are the consequences for torturing Death and making it a pet for seventy years? 

He smiles, a humorless grimace, and thinks--I am. 

~*~ 

He finds the bodies on the fourth base. 

It's quiet, something that makes the hair on the back of his neck prickle, and his palms sweat, as he slips silent into the base. There are no bodies, and no blood, and there's no guards, no activity at all--but there's a low hum in the air that makes his mouth go dry, and he follows it, the whistling song, until he finds it. 

The guards. The scientists and guards and Handlers and commander. 

Every Hydra operative assigned to the base. Thirty in all, laid out neat and orderly, and waiting for him. 

The song is almost  _ deafening _ . 

His mouth waters, and he hesitates, standing hidden in the shadows, until he sees it. 

A star pained in blood and ash, against the far wall. 

He smiles, and slips into the room, and Death  _ wails _ . 

~*~ 

Steve, he thinks, later, dizzy and drunk on the glut of death and the blood under his nails, always left him the strangest and sweetest of love letters. 

~*~

He chases Steve and his odd winged companion across Europe, a step or two behind and happy that way, content to find the bloody bodies waiting to be reaped that Steve left for him, happy to find the gutted remains of the people who hurt him. 

He chases Steve across Europe and Asia and into Africa, and the song never changes, the soothing Death song that isn't Steve's--Steve's death song is chilling and haunting and lovely and this--this is intoxicatingly beautiful and tugs at him, begs him to Reap. 

This isn't the song of Steve Rogers dying. 

It's the song of him killing. 

~*~ 

He chases Steve across the world, and accepts the bloody courting gifts Steve leaves for him, and aches for  _ more _ . 


	12. A Place Called Home

A lifetime ago, they lived in a tiny cold water apartment, something that barely constituted a home, except that it was  _ theirs _ , full of Bucky's voice singing and Becca's books scattered when she visited and Steve's drawings, and socks and stacks of books, falling apart and falling over. 

It was where he was happiest, a place that even seventy years of torture couldn't carve away. 

Sometimes, when he was in cryo, he dreamt of it, of the smell of boiling cabbage and the curve of Steve's neck as he tipped his head, the curl of his lips when he grinned at Bucky, the smear of red against his teeth when he came home spitting mad and bruising. 

Now, he dreams of it as he follows a trail of bloody love letters across the world. 

He dreams of a place that was his, and home, once, a place that no longer exists. 

He thinks, though--that Steve does. 

And maybe that's enough. 

It isn't the lumpy bed and dingy walls and draft coming in through the window that made that tiny cold-water shack  _ home _ . 

~*~ 

He stands on the street, cloaked in shadows, and there is no blood under his nails, nothing dirty and tangled about him except his heart, as he stares up at the apartment building. 

It's a three story walkup and there's beautiful lighting, in the mornings, and Stark-level security, which--Bucky can't help but think--isn't enough, not for Steve. 

He's been standing here for three nights now. 

"Are you going to come in?" a voice, achingly familiar, says, softly. Bucky twitches and sighs. Looks at him from the corner of his eye. 

He looks--he looks like Bucky remembers and not, an oversized overlay for the boy in his memories, the boy who glared at him from his deathbed and demanded stories. 

He's big, bright and beautiful, and he almost vibrates with impatience, staring at Bucky with naked hunger. 

That's why he's here, after all. To come in. 

He follows Steve across the street and into the apartment, and let's the door close softly behind them. 

~*~ 

"Do you remember the first time you called me Bucky?" he asks, the next morning. The sun isn't up, the shadows thick and shifting around him in the quiet apartment that feels familiar and strange. Steve won't stop  _ staring _ at him, and it's itchy, a burning along his skin that makes him want to move closer and makes him want to bolt away, both. 

"Yes. You were just as scared as I was, sent to reap me--and then you didn't." 

"You Named me," Bucky says, softly. Wonderingly. "I don't even know why." 

"Because Death isn't a name, Buck. And everyone deserves that. Deserves a name to call their own, and a place to belong." 

"Do I?" he asks, and it's small. Steve puts the coffee down on the counter and moves to crouch in front of him. "Do I still belong?" 

"Buck," Steve whispers. 

"I'm not that boy. I'm not a Reaper with no idea what I'm doing. I--Steve, I am  _ drenched _ in blood. I have killed more than any Reaper. I was Death before Hydra got me, and they--" 

"That's not who you are," Steve says gently. 

"It's who I've always been," Bucky says dully. He is so  _ tired _ . 

"You're Bucky Barnes. My best friend and Fred Barnes' son, and a damn stubborn bastard," Steve says, sharply. "You're a flirt and good son, and a dirty fighter and the best Sarge I've ever had the pleasure to work with, and the only person I've ever loved." 

"Well, you never had a lick of sense in your head," Bucky says, and Steve snorts. "Who names their damn Grim Reapers, Rogers? I shoulda taken you that first night and gotten on with things." 

"You didn't. Why didn't you?" 

He's never asked that. Always wondered and never asked. 

"Your song," Bucky says, and closes his eyes. He can hear it still--stubborn and strong and unaccountably sweet, this siren song he could never quite get out of his ears. "I didn't want it to end." He opens his eyes and finds Steve staring, bright blue and earnest. "I didn't want  _ you _ to end." 

"Bucky--" he breathes. 

"I'm not that boy anymore, Rogers," he says, sharply and Steve smiles. 

"Sweetheart, I left you bodies as a fucking love letter. I don't think any of us are who we were. I don't think we  _ can _ be." 

"You're still Steve," Bucky says, firmly and Steve's lips tilt up, soft and sweet. "Still mine." 

"You'll always be mine," Steve murmurs, and his song twists around Bucky, a siren song promise, and he lets himself believe it, as Steve murmurs his name, the most beloved of chains, and he sighs, kisses him as the sun rose and the shadows slipped away. 


End file.
